AMERICAN LITERATURE

II
AL POEMS
 AMERICAN LITERATURE - II
POEMS

A Hillside Thaw
By Robert Frost

To think to know the country and not know

The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!
As often as I've seen it done before
I can't pretend to tell the way it's done.
It looks as if some magic of the sun
Lifted the rug that bred them on the floor
And the light breaking on them made them run.
But if I thought to stop the wet stampede,
And caught one silver lizard by the tail,
And put my foot on one without avail,
And threw myself wet-elbowed and wet-kneed
In front of twenty others' wriggling speed,
In the confusion of them all aglitter,
And birds that joined in the excited fun
By doubling and redoubling song and twitter,
I have no doubt I'd end by holding none.

It takes the moon for this. The sun's a wizard

By all I tell; but so's the moon a witch.
From the high west she makes a gentle cast
And suddenly, without a jerk or twitch,
She has her spell on every single lizard.
I fancied when I looked at six o'clock
The swarm still ran and scuttled just as fast.
The moon was waiting for her chill effect.
I looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock
In every lifelike posture of the swarm,
Transfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.
Across each other and side by side they lay.
The spell that so could hold them as they were
Was wrought through trees without a breath of storm
To make a leaf, if there had been one, stir.
It was the moon's: she held them until day,
One lizard at the end of every ray.
The thought of my attempting such a stay!
Chicago
By Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have
seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this
my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to
be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a
tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man
laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a
battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under
his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
Poetry
By Marianne Moore

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they

are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf

under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that
feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
 to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make

a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result
is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we

have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of
their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Skunk Hour
By Robert Lowell

(For Elizabeth Bishop)Dedication Lowell’s poem is modeled on

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo,” which Bishop had
dedicated to Lowell.

Nautilus Island’s hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill—

we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
Runagate, Runagate
By Robert Hayden

I.
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going
Runagate
Runagate
Runagate
Many thousands rise and go
many thousands crossing over
O mythic North
O star-shaped yonder Bible city

Some go weeping and some rejoicing

some in coffins and some in carriages
some in silks and some in shackles

Rise and go or fare you well

No more auction block for me

no more driver’s lash for me
 If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age,
new breeches, plain stockings, negro shoes;
if you see my Anna, likely young mulatto
branded E on the right cheek, R on the left,
catch them if you can and notify subscriber.
Catch them if you can, but it won’t be easy.
They’ll dart underground when you try to catch them,
plunge into quicksand, whirlpools, mazes,
turn into scorpions when you try to catch them.

And before I’ll be a slave

I’ll be buried in my grave

North star and bonanza gold

I’m bound for the freedom, freedom-bound
and oh Susyanna don’t you cry for me

Runagate

Runagate

II.
Rises from their anguish and their power,

Harriet Tubman,

woman of earth, whipscarred,

a summoning, a shining
 Mean to be free

And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,

way we journeyed from Can’t to Can.
Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
we’ll never make it. Hush that now,
and she’s turned upon us, levelled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can’t jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says.

Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General

alias Moses Stealer of Slaves

In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson

Garrett Douglas Thoreau John Brown

Armed and known to be Dangerous

Wanted Reward Dead or Alive

Tell me, Ezekiel, oh tell me do you see

mailed Jehovah coming to deliver me?
Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air,
five times calling to the hants in the air.
Shadow of a face in the scary leaves,
shadow of a voice in the talking leaves:

Come ride-a my train

Oh that train, ghost-story train

through swamp and savanna movering movering,
over trestles of dew, through caves of the wish,
Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering,
first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.

Come ride-a my train

Mean mean mean to be free.

Mirror
By Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Harlem
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
Perhaps the World Ends Here
By Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to

live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it
has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the

corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be

human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our
children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as
we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the
shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for
burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and
remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are
laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
PROSE
Robert Frost
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the
artists of our day. Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in
thought. Then it will go hard if we can’t in practice. Our lives for it.

Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is
the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do
till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as
possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax,
words, sentences, metre are not enough. We need the help of context– meaning-subject matter. That
is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with
metres—particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose
iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful
to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief
from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the
rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having
something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider
experience.

Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound
to being a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a Poem. Our problem then is, as modern
abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as
aberrationists, giving way to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance
suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper. Theme
alone can steady us down. just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a
straightness as metre, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time
a subject that shall be fulfilled.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in
delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the
ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it
assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a
clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in
a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen
was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but
a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds
its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and
sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in
a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad
recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply

1
keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and
so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are
always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may Want to
strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being
mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern
instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old
days.

I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward,
in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a
revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there
must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in
it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom.
We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of
age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be
completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right
and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material-the condition of body and mind
now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work
from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by.
Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs
cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will
stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-
assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and
art. A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he
learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and
space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was
organic. More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was
mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For
myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described:
from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the
poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be
worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the
poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance.
It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

2
 I HAVE A DREAM
Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the
history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation
Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been
seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly
crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a
lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still
languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today
to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent
words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every
American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be
guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has
defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred
obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the
great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand
the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in
the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of
democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.
Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time
to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's
legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty‐three is
not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will
have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America
until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our
nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of
justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy
our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the
high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again
and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white
people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their
destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our
freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as
long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our
bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be
satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self‐hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites
Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has
nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream."¹

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh
from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest ‐‐ quest for freedom left you battered
by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative
suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to
Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our
northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in
the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to
be self‐evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with
the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the
words of "interposition" and "nullification" ‐‐ one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able
to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough
places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and
all flesh shall see it together."2

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to
transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able
to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together,
knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day ‐‐ this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow‐capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from
every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men,
Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3

 Alice Walker

In Search oj Our Mothers' Gardens

I described her own nature and temperament. Told how they needed a larger life
for their expression. ... I pointed out that in lieu of proper channels, her emo­
tions had overflowed into paths that dissipated them. I talked, beautifully I
thought, about an art that would be born, an art that would open the way for
women the likes of her. I asked her to hope, and build up an inner life against the
coming of that day. ... I sang, with a strange quiver in my voice, a promise
song.-]ean Toomer, "Avey," Cane

The poet speaking to a prostitute who falls asleep while he's talking-
When the poet Jean Toomer walked through the South in the early
twenties, he discovered a curious thing: black women whose spirituality was
so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they were themselves unaware of the
richness they held. They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so
abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they
considered themselves unworthy even of hope. In the selfless abstractions
their bodies became to the men who used them, they became more than
"sexual objects," more even than mere women: they became "Saints." Instead
of being perceived as whole persons, their bodies became shrines: what was
thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship. These crazy
Saints stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics-or qUietly, like suicides;
and the "God" that was in their gaze was as mute as a great stone.
Who were these Saints? These crazy, loony, pitiful women?
Some of them, without a doubt, were our mothers and grandmothers.
In the still heat of the post-Reconstruction South, this is how they seemed
to Jean Toomer: exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey, toiling away

This essay first appeared in Alice Walker, In Search oj Our Mothers' Gardens (New York, 1972).
 In Sear
402 Alice Walker

their lives in an era, a century, that did not acknowledge them, except as "the . cis? Or was her body broken and forced t
mule of the world." They dreamed dreams that no one knew-not ten than not sold away from her)-eight
themselves, in any coherent fashion-and saw visions no one could hen her one joy was the thought of model-
stand. They wandered or sat about the countryside crooning lullabies to one or clay?
ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls. How was the creativity of the black worn:
They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spir- .. entury after century, when for most of the
its sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay. And when merica, it was a punishable crime for a bI;
those frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one e freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand tt
mourned. Instead, men lit candles to celebrate the emptiness that remained, Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, wI
as people do who enter a beautiful but vacant space to resurrect a God. singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Lis
Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flae
written. And they waited. . (hers and imagine those voices muzzled
They waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be ~mp;ehend the lives of our "crazy," "Sain
made known; but guessed, somehow in their darkness, that on the day of 'The agony of the lives of women who m
their revelation they would be long dead. Therefore to Toomer they walked, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over,
and even ran, in slow motion. For they were going nowhere immediate, and with their real gifts stifled within them.
the future was not yet within their grasp. And men took our mothers and _~ And, if this were the end of the story, we'
grandmothers, "but got no pleasure from it." So complex was their passion paraphrase of Okot p'Bitek's great poem:
and their calm. 0, my clanswomen
To Toomer, they lay vacant and fallow as autumn fields, with harvest time Let us all cry together!
never in Sight: and he saw them enter loveless marriages, without joy; and Come,
become prostitutes, without resistance; and become mothers of children, Let us mourn the death
withou t fulfillment. The death of a Queen
For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; The ash that was produ
driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them By a great fire!
for which there was no release. They were Creators, who lived lives of 0, this homestead is ut
spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality-which is the basis Close the gates
of Art-that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove With lacari thorns,
them insane. Throwing away this spirituality was their pathetic attempt to For our mother
lighten the soul to a weight their work-worn, sexually abused bodies could The creator of the Stoo
bear. And all the young won
What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' Have perished in the \\
time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel
enough to stop the blood. But this is not the end of the story, for a
Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some and grandmothers, ourselves-have not pI
ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash? Or was she required to bake ask ourselves why, and search for and finl
biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint all efforts to erase it from our minds, just
watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasture- American women are.
It did not acknowledge them, except as "the
:led dreams that no one knew-not even
ion-and saw visions no one could under­
T
j
t
out the countryside crooning lullabies to
If Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls.
esert their bodies and their striving spir­
lwinds from the hard red clay. And when
Ittered particles, upon the ground, no one
s to celebrate the emptiness that remained,
1but vacant space to resurrect a God.
'S, some of them: moving to music not yet
unknown thing that was in them would be
how in their darkness, that on the day of
Ig dead. Therefore to Toomer they walked,
. they were going nowhere immediate, and
ir grasp. And men took our mothers and
re from it." So complex was their passion
fallow as autumn fields, with harvest time
:nter loveless marriages, without joy; and
:tance; and become mothers of children,
lthers of ours were not Saints, but Artists;
.dness by the springs of creativity in them
They were Creators, who lived lives of
so rich in spirituality-which is the basis
their unused and unwanted talent drove
spirituality was their pathetic attempt to
York-worn, sexually abused bodies could
man to be an artist in our grandmothers'
lay? It is a question with an answer cruel
great-grandmother who died under some
seer's lash? Or was she required to bake
" when she cried out in her soul to paint
'alling on the green and peaceful pasture-
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
lands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more
often than not sold away from her)-eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children­
40 3
when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion, in
stone or clay?
How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and
century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in
America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And
the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.
Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if
singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith,
Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among
others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to
comprehend the lives of our "crazy," "Sainted" mothers and grandmothers.
The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists,
Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period of centuries), who died
with their real gifts stifled within them.
And, if this were the end of the story, we would have cause to cry out in my
paraphrase of Okot p'Bitek's great poem:
0, my clanswomen
Let us all cry together!
Come,
Let us mourn the death of our mother,
The death of a Queen
The ash that was produced
Bya great fire!
0, this homestead is utterly dead
Close the gates
With lacari thorns,
For our mother
The creator of the Stool is lost!
And all the young women
Have perished in the wilderness!
But this is not the end of the story, for all the young women-our mothers
and grandmothers, ourselves-have not perished in the wilderness. And if we
ask ourselves why, and search for and find the answer, we will know beyond
all efforts to erase it from our minds, just exactly who, and of what, we black
American women are.
404 Alice Walker In Se

One example, perhaps the most pathetic, most misunderstood one, can So torn by "contrary instincts" was blad
provide a backdrop for our mothers' work: Phillis Wheatley, a slave in the her deSCription of "the Goddess"-as she p
17oos. not have-is ironically, cruelly humorous.
Virginia Woolf, in her book A Room of Ones Own, wrote that in order for a ridicule for more than a century. It is usu
woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her memory as that of a fool. She wrote:
own (With key and lock) and enough money to support herself.
The Goddess comes, she moves
What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not
Olive and laurel binds her golde
even herself? This sickly, frail black girl who required a servant of her own at
Wherever shines this native of t
times-her health was so precarious-and who, had she been white, would
Unnumber'd charms and recenl
have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and
most of the men in the society of her day. It is obvious that Phillis, the slave, c<
Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis, that morning; prior, perhaps, to bringing in
"any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert "eigh­ c'·····'M~·,· lunch. She took her imagery from the on
teenth century," insert "black woman," insert "born or made a slave"] would others.
certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in .some ,lonely With the benefit of hindsight we ask, "1
cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert "Saint"], leared and But at last, Phillis, we understand. No
mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly struggling, ambivalent lines are forced or
gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so not an idiot or a traitor; only a sickly lit
thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add "chains, guns, the lash, the home and country and made a slave; a wo
ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion"L song that was your gift, although in a lane
that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty." your bewildered tongue. It is not so muc
The key words, as they relate to Phillis, are "contrary instincts." For when alive, in so many of our ancestors, the noti
we read the poetry of Phillis Wheatley-as when we read the novels of Nella
Larsen or the oddly false-sounding autobiography of that freest of all black Black women are called, in the folklore th
women writers, Zora Hurston-evidence of "contrary instincts" is every­ society, "the mule of the world," because
where. Her loyalties were completely divided, as was, without question, her that everyone else-everyone else-refuse!
mind. "Matriarchs," "Superwomen," and "Mean
But how could this be otherwise? Captured at seven, a slave of wealthy, "Castraters" and "Sapphire's Mama." Whe
doting whites who instilled in her the "savagery" of the Africa they "rescued" ing, our character has been distorted; wh(
her from, one wonders if she was even able to remember her homeland as she we have been handed empty inspiration
had known it, or as it really was. farthest corner. When we have asked for
Yet, because she did try to use her gift for poetry in a world that made her a In short, even our plainer gifts, our lab<
slave, she was "so thwarted and hindered by ... contrary instincts, that knocked down our throats. To be an arti
she ... lost her health...." In the last years of her brief life, burdened not lowers our status in many respects, rath(
only with the need to express her gift but also with a penniless, friendless will be.
"freedom" and several small children for whom she was forced to do stren­ Therefore we must fearlessly pull out 0
uous work to feed, she lost her health, certainly. Suffering from malnutrition with our lives the living creativity some a
and neglect and who knows what mental agonies, Phillis Wheatley died. allowed to know. I stress some of them

ost pathetic, most misunderstood one, can
:hers' work: Phillis Wheatley, a slave in the
Room of One's Own, wrote that in order for a
;t have two things, certainly: a room of her
eJugh money to support herself.
f Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not
lck girl who required a servant of her own at
ious-and who, had she been white, would
intellectual superior of all the women and
[her day.
speaking of course not of our Phillis, that
gift in the sixteenth century [insert "eigh­
Iman," insert "born or made a slave"] would
t herself, or ended her days in -some lonely
fitch, half wizard [insert "Saint"], 'feared and
:ill and psychology to be sure that a highly
;e her gift for poetry would have been so
try instincts [add "chains, guns, the lash, the
eone else, submission to an alien religion"],
h and sanity to a certainty."
to Phillis, are "contrary instincts." For when
eatley-as when we read the novels of Nella
lng autobiography of that freest of all black
-evidence of "contrary instincts" is every­
etely divided, as was, without question, her
rise? Captured at seven, a slave of wealthy,
:r the "savagery" of the Africa they "rescued"
even able to remember her homeland as she
her gift for poetry in a world that made her a
:i hindered by ... contrary instincts, that
the last years of her brief life, burdened not
er gift but also with a penniless, friendless
dren for whom she was forced to do stren­
ealth, certainly. Suffering from malnutrition
t mental agonies, Phillis Wheatley died.
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 405
So tom by "contrary instincts" was black, kidnapped, enslaved Phillis that
her description of "the Goddess"-as she poetically called the Liberty she did
not have-is ironically, cruelly humorous. And, in fact, has held Phillis up to
ridicule for more than a century. It is usually read prior to hanging Phillis's
memory as that of a fool. She wrote:
The Goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds her golden hair.
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber'd charms and recent graces rise. [My italics]
It is obvious that Phillis, the slave, combed the "Goddess's" hair every
morning; prior, perhaps, to bringing in the milk, or fixing her mistress's
lunch. She took her imagery from the one thing she saw elevated above all
others.
With the benefit of hindsight we ask, "How could she?"
But at last, Phillis, we understand. No more snickering when your stiff,
struggling, ambivalent lines are forced on us. We know now that you were
not an idiot or a traitor; only a sickly little black girl, snatched from your
home and country and made a slave; a woman who still struggled to sing the
song that was your gift, although in a land of barbarians who praised you for
your bewildered tongue. It is not so much what you sang, as that you kept
alive, in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song.
Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one's status in
society, "the mule of the world," because we have been handed the burdens
that everyone else-everyone else-refused to carry. We have also been called
"Matriarchs," "Superwomen," and "Mean and Evil Bitches." Not to mention
"Castraters" and "Sapphire's Mama." When we have pleaded for understand­
ing, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for Simple caring,
we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in the
farthest comer. When we have asked for love, we have been given children.
In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been
knocked down our throats. To be an artist and a black woman, even today,
lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it and yet, artists we
will be.
Therefore we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify
with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not
allowed to know. I stress some of them because it is well known that the
406 Alice Walker In Se,

majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without "knowing" it, the For example: in the Smithsonian Instit
reality of their spirituality, even if they didn't recognize it beyond what hangs a quilt unlike any other in the wo
happened in the singing at church-and they never had any intention of simple and identifiable figures, it portrays
giving it up. considered rare, beyond price. Though it f
,'makIng, and though it is made of bits a
How they did it-those millions of black women who were not Phillis obviously the work of a person of powerf
Wheatley, or Lucy Terry or Frances Harper or Zora Hurston or Nella Larsen feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note that s.
or Bessie Smith; or Elizabeth Catlett, or Katherine Dunham, either-brings Black woman in Alabama, a hundred yean
me to the title of this essay, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," which is a If we could locate this "anonymous" 1
personal account that is yet shared, in its theme and its meaning, by all of us. would tum out to be one of our grandmo
I found, while thinking about the far-reaching world of the creative black in the only materials she could afford, anc
woman, that often the truest answer to a question that really matters can be in society allowed her to use.
found very close. As Virginia Woolf wrote further, in A Ro

Yet genius of a sort must have existed an

In the late 1920S my mother ran away from home to marry my father. Mar­
isted among the working class. [Chang,
riage, if not running away, was expected of seventeen-year-old girls. By the -­
and daughters of sharecroppers."] Now
time she was twenty, she had two children and was pregnant with a third.
Robert Bums [change this to "a Zora
Five children later, I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother:
blazes out and proves its presence. But,
she seemed a large, soft, loving-eyed woman who was rarely impatient in our
paper. When, however, one reads of a VI
home. Her quick, violent temper was on view only a few times a year, when
possessed by devils [or "Sainthood"],
she battled with the white landlord who had the misfortune to suggest to her
[our root workers], or even a very rem,
that her children did not need to go to school.
then I think we are on the track of a los
She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers' overalls. She made all
some mute and ingloriOUS Jane Austen.
the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables
guess that Anon, who wrote so many pc
and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all
often a woman. . . .
our beds.
During the "working" day, she labored beside-not behind-my father in And so our mothers and grandmothers
the fields. Her day began before sunup, and did not end until late at night. mously, handed on the creative spark, the
There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter t
own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption-by work or the And so it is, certainly, with my own me
noisy inquiries of her many children. And yet, it is to my mother-and all our which retained their creator's name even
mothers who were not famous-that I went in search of the secret of what Smith's mouth, no song or poem will bear
has fed that muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the the stories that I write, that we all wril
black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to recently did I fully realize this: that throug
this day. stories of her life, I have absorbed not
But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or something of the manner in which she spe
care about feeding the creative spirit? involves the knowledge that her stories-L
The answer is so Simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We probably for this reason that so much of w
have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high-and low. ters whose counterparts in real life are so ]
 ~'.""".""".1
"~I
,I
lers knew, even ,without "knowing" it, the
I if they didn't recognize it beyond what
rch-and they never had any intention of
s of black women who were not Phillis
es Harper or lora Hurston or Nella Larsen
lett, or Katherine Dunham, either-brings
:arch of Our Mothers' Gardens," which is a
:l, in its theme and its meaning, by all of us.
,e far-reaching world of the creative black
ver to a question that really matters can be
lway from horne to marry my father. Mar­
(pected of seventeen-year-old girls. By the
) children and was pregnant with a third.
Id this is how I carne to know my mother:
ed woman who was rarely impatient in Our
was on view only a few times a year, when
:l who had the misfortune to suggest to her
~o to school.
'e, even my brothers' overalls. She made all
J.e spent the summers canning vegetables
venings making quilts enough to cover all
labored beside-not behind-my father in
unup, and did not end until late at night.
r to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her
le free from interruption-by work or the
:n. And yet, it is to my mother-and all our
hat I went in search of the secret of what
tilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the
tat pops out in wild and unlikely places to
Jverworked mother have time to know or
it?
ty of us have spent years discovering it. We
Iwe should have looked high-and low.
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 407
For example: in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there
hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet
simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is
considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt­
making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is
obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual
feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note that says it was made by "an anonymous
Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago."
If we could locate this "anonymous" black woman from Alabama, she
would turn out to be one of our grandmothers-an artist who left her mark
in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position
in society allowed her to use.
As Virginia Woolf wrote further, in A Room of Ones Own:
Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have ex­
isted among the working class. [Change this to "slaves" and "the wives
and daughters of sharecroppers."] Now and again an Emily Bronte or a
Robert Burns [change this to "a lora Hurston or a Richard Wright"]
blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to
paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman
possessed by devils [or "Sainthood"], of a wise woman selling herbs
[our root workers], or even a very remarkable man who had a mother,
then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of
some mute and inglorious Jane Austen... : Indeed, I would venture to
guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was
often a woman. . . .
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anony­
mously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves
never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
And so it is, certainly, with my own mother. Unlike "Ma" Rainey's songs,
which retained their creator's name even while blasting forth from Bessie
Smith's mouth, no song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of
the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories. Only
recently did I fully realize this: that through years oflistening to my mother's
stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but
something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that
involves the knowledge that her stories-like her life-must be recorded. It is
probably for this reason that so much of what I have written is about charac­
ters whose counterparts in real life are so much older than I am.
408 Alice Walker
In Se"

But the telling of these stories, which came from my mother's lips as They were wome
naturally as breathing, was not the only way my mother showed herself as an My mama's genel
artist. For stories, too, were subject to being distracted, to dying without Husky of voice­
conclusion. Dinners must be started, and cotton must be gathered before the Step
big rains. The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after With fists as well
many years. This is what I finally noticed: Hands
Like Mem, a character in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, my mother How they battere
adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And Doors
not just your typical straggly country stand of zinnias, either. She planted And ironed
ambitious gardens-and still does-with over fifty different varieties of plants Starched white
that bloom profusely from early March until late November. Before she left Shirts
home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass, and laid How they led
out new beds. When she returned from the fields she might divide clumps of Armies
bulbs, dig a cold pit, uproot and replant roses, or prune branches from her Headragged Gen
taller bushes or trees-until night came and it was too dark to see. Across mined
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of . Fields
flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flow­ Bobby-trapped
ers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms-sun­ Kitchens
flowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena ... To discover bo01
and on and on. Desks
And I remember people coming to my mother's yard to be given cuttings A place for us
from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever How they knew'
rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant Must know
with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativ­ Without knowin
ity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia-perfect strang­ Of it
ers and imperfect strangers-and ask to stand or walk among my mother's Themselves.
art.
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is Guided by my heritage of a love of bea'
radiant, almost to the point of being invisible-except as Creator: hand and search of my mother's garden, I found my ,
eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the And perhaps in Africa over two hundre
image of her personal conception of Beauty. mother; perhaps she painted vivid and d
Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she yellows and greens on the walls of her hut
leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She has handed down Roberta Flack's-sweetly over the compo
respect for the pOSSibilities-and the will to grasp them. WOve the most stunning mats or told the
For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an artist village storytellers. Perhaps she was herse
has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even in very ter's name is signed to the poems that we 1
simple ways, is work black women have done for a very long time. Perhaps Phillis Wheatley's mother was <
This poem is not enough, but it is something, for the woman who literally Perhaps in more than Phillis Wheatle
covered the holes in our walls with sunflowers: signature made clear.
 In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 409

ies, which came from my mother's lips as They were women then
he only way my mother showed herself as a My mama's generation
bject to being distracted, to dying withou~ Husky of voice-Stout of
rted, and cotton must be gathered before th Step
l is my mother showed itself to me onlyafte; With fists as well as
'1 noticed:
Hands
: Third Life of Grange Copeland, my mother How they battered down
;habby house we were forced to live in. And Doors
mntry stand of zinnias, either. She planted And ironed
s-with over fifty different varieties of plants Starched white
March until late November. Before she left Shirts
her flowers, chopped up the grass, and laid How they led
d from the fields she might divide clumps of Armies
l replant roses, or prune branches from her Headragged Generals
t came and it was too dark to see. Across mined
s if by magic, and her fame as a grower of Fields
es. Because of her creativity with her flow­ Bobby-trapped
'1 are seen through a screen of blooms-sun_ Kitchens
forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena ... To discover books
Desks
Ig to my mother's yard to be given cuttings A place for us
~ praise showered on her because whatever How they knew what we
Imed into a garden. A garden so brilliant Must know
sign, so magnificent with life and creativ­ Without knowing a page
by our house in Georgia-perfect strang- Of it
I ask to stand or walk among my mothers "'·:.·',c·I~ Themselves.

mother is working in her flowers that she is
ing invisible-except as Creator: hand and
Jul must have. Ordering the universe in the
of Beauty.
rt that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she
es and cherishes life. She has handed down
the will to grasp them.
jed upon in so many ways, being an artist
life. This ability to hold on, even in very
fl have done for a very long time.
is something, for the woman who literally
h sunflowers:
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in
search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
And perhaps in Africa over two hundred years ago, there was just such a
mother; perhaps she painted vivid and daring decorations in oranges and
yellows and greens on the walls of her hut; perhaps she sang-in a voice like
Roberta Flack's-sweetly over the compounds of her village; perhaps she
wove the most stunning mats or told the most ingenious stories of all the
village storytellers. Perhaps she was herself a poet-though only her daugh­
ter's name is Signed to the poems that we know.
Perhaps Phillis Wheatley's mother was also an artist.
Perhaps in more than Phillis Wheatley's biological life is her mother's
signature made clear.
DRAMA
SHORT STORIES
 The Library of America • Story of the Week
Reprinted from Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910 (The Library of America,
2001), pages 65–75. Copyright © 2001 Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc.

First published in The Greater Inclination (1899).

A Journey

A s she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead,

the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her
deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The
sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet
window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long
stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her
head and looked through the opening in the hangings at her
husband’s curtains across the aisle . . .
She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she
could hear him if he called. His voice had grown very weak
within the last months and it irritated him when she did not
hear. This irritability, this increasing childish petulance
seemed to give expression to their imperceptible estrange-
ment. Like two faces looking at one another through a sheet
of glass they were close together, almost touching, but they
could not hear or feel each other: the conductivity between
them was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation,
and she fancied sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look
with which he supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the
fault was hers. She was too impenetrably healthy to be
touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-reproachful
tenderness was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she
had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his helpless
tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so
unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust
measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an ex-
haustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers
still bounded ahead of life, preëmpting unclaimed regions of
hope and activity, while his lagged behind, vainly struggling
to overtake her.
When they married, she had such arrears of living to make
up: her days had been as bare as the white-washed school-
room where she forced innutritious facts upon reluctant
children. His coming had broken in on the slumber of cir-
cumstance, widening the present till it became the encloser of
remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed.
65
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66 a journey

Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to

spread her wings.
At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air
would set him right; but when he came back this assurance
was explained as having of course included a winter in a dry
climate. They gave up their pretty house, storing the wedding
presents and new furniture, and went to Colorado. She had
hated it there from the first. Nobody knew her or cared about
her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had
made, or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting-cards
which were still a surprise to her. And he kept growing worse.
She felt herself beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought
by so direct a temperament. She still loved him, of course; but
he was gradually, undefinably ceasing to be himself. The man
she had married had been strong, active, gently masterful: the
male whose pleasure it is to clear a way through the material
obstructions of life; but now it was she who was the protec-
tor, he who must be shielded from importunities and given
his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling. The
routine of the sick-room bewildered her; this punctual ad-
ministering of medicine seemed as idle as some uncompre-
hended religious mummery.
There were moments, indeed, when warm gushes of pity
swept away her instinctive resentment of his condition, when
she still found his old self in his eyes as they groped for each
other through the dense medium of his weakness. But these
moments had grown rare. Sometimes he frightened her: his
sunken expressionless face seemed that of a stranger; his voice
was weak and hoarse; his thin-lipped smile a mere muscular
contraction. Her hand avoided his damp soft skin, which had
lost the familiar roughness of health: she caught herself
furtively watching him as she might have watched a strange
animal. It frightened her to feel that this was the man she
loved; there were hours when to tell him what she suffered
seemed the one escape from her fears. But in general she
judged herself more leniently, reflecting that she had perhaps
been too long alone with him, and that she would feel differ-
ently when they were at home again, surrounded by her ro-
bust and buoyant family. How she had rejoiced when the
doctors at last gave their consent to his going home! She
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knew, of course, what the decision meant; they both knew. It

meant that he was to die; but they dressed the truth in hope-
ful euphuisms, and at times, in the joy of preparation, she re-
ally forgot the purpose of their journey, and slipped into an
eager allusion to next year’s plans.
At last the day of leaving came. She had a dreadful fear that
they would never get away; that somehow at the last moment
he would fail her; that the doctors held one of their accus-
tomed treacheries in reserve; but nothing happened. They
drove to the station, he was installed in a seat with a rug over
his knees and a cushion at his back, and she hung out of the
window waving unregretful farewells to the acquaintances she
had really never liked till then.
The first twenty-four hours had passed off well. He re-
vived a little and it amused him to look out of the window
and to observe the humours of the car. The second day he
began to grow weary and to chafe under the dispassionate
stare of the freckled child with the lump of chewing-gum.
She had to explain to the child’s mother that her husband
was too ill to be disturbed: a statement received by that lady
with a resentment visibly supported by the maternal senti-
ment of the whole car . . . .
That night he slept badly and the next morning his tem-
perature frightened her: she was sure he was growing worse.
The day passed slowly, punctuated by the small irritations of
travel. Watching his tired face, she traced in its contractions
every rattle and jolt of the train, till her own body vibrated
with sympathetic fatigue. She felt the others observing him
too, and hovered restlessly between him and the line of inter-
rogative eyes. The freckled child hung about him like a fly;
offers of candy and picture-books failed to dislodge her: she
twisted one leg around the other and watched him imper-
turbably. The porter, as he passed, lingered with vague prof-
fers of help, probably inspired by philanthropic passengers
swelling with the sense that “something ought to be done;”
and one nervous man in a skull-cap was audibly concerned as
to the possible effect on his wife’s health.
The hours dragged on in a dreary inoccupation. Towards
dusk she sat down beside him and he laid his hand on hers.
The touch startled her. He seemed to be calling her from far
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68 a journey

off. She looked at him helplessly and his smile went through
her like a physical pang.
“Are you very tired?” she asked.
“No, not very.”
“We’ll be there soon now.”
“Yes, very soon.”
“This time to-morrow—”
He nodded and they sat silent. When she had put him to
bed and crawled into her own berth she tried to cheer herself
with the thought that in less than twenty-four hours they
would be in New York. Her people would all be at the station
to meet her—she pictured their round unanxious faces press-
ing through the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell
him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be
all right in no time: the subtler sympathies developed by long
contact with suffering were making her aware of a certain
coarseness of texture in the family sensibilities.
Suddenly she thought she heard him call. She parted the
curtains and listened. No, it was only a man snoring at the
other end of the car. His snores had a greasy sound, as
though they passed through tallow. She lay down and tried to
sleep . . . Had she not heard him move? She started up trem-
bling . . . The silence frightened her more than any sound.
He might not be able to make her hear—he might be calling
her now . . . What made her think of such things? It was
merely the familiar tendency of an over-tired mind to fasten
itself on the most intolerable chance within the range of its
forebodings . . . Putting her head out, she listened; but she
could not distinguish his breathing from that of the other
pairs of lungs about her. She longed to get up and look at
him, but she knew the impulse was a mere vent for her rest-
lessness, and the fear of disturbing him restrained her. . . .
The regular movement of his curtain reassured her, she knew
not why; she remembered that he had wished her a cheerful
good-night; and the sheer inability to endure her fears a mo-
ment longer made her put them from her with an effort of
her whole sound tired body. She turned on her side and slept.
She sat up stiffly, staring out at the dawn. The train was
rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a
lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation. The air of
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a journey 69

the car was close, and she pushed up her window to let in the
keen wind. Then she looked at her watch: it was seven
o’clock, and soon the people about her would be stirring. She
slipped into her clothes, smoothed her dishevelled hair and
crept to the dressing-room. When she had washed her face
and adjusted her dress she felt more hopeful. It was always a
struggle for her not to be cheerful in the morning. Her
cheeks burned deliciously under the coarse towel and the wet
hair about her temples broke into strong upward tendrils.
Every inch of her was full of life and elasticity. And in ten
hours they would be at home!
She stepped to her husband’s berth: it was time for him to
take his early glass of milk. The window-shade was down, and
in the dusk of the curtained enclosure she could just see that
he lay sideways, with his face away from her. She leaned over
him and drew up the shade. As she did so she touched one of
his hands. It felt cold . . .
She bent closer, laying her hand on his arm and calling
him by name. He did not move. She spoke again more
loudly; she grasped his shoulder and gently shook it. He lay
motionless. She caught hold of his hand again: it slipped
from her limply, like a dead thing. A dead thing? . . . Her
breath caught. She must see his face. She leaned forward,
and hurriedly, shrinkingly, with a sickening reluctance of the
flesh, laid her hands on his shoulders and turned him over.
His head fell back; his face looked small and smooth; he
gazed at her with steady eyes.
She remained motionless for a long time, holding him thus;
and they looked at each other. Suddenly she shrank back: the
longing to scream, to call out, to fly from him, had almost
overpowered her. But a strong hand arrested her. Good God!
If it were known that he was dead they would be put off the
train at the next station—
In a terrifying flash of remembrance there arose before her
a scene she had once witnessed in travelling, when a husband
and wife, whose child had died in the train, had been thrust
out at some chance station. She saw them standing on the
platform with the child’s body between them; she had never
forgotten the dazed look with which they followed the reced-
ing train. And this was what would happen to her. Within the
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70 a journey

next hour she might find herself on the platform of some

strange station, alone with her husband’s body. . . . Anything
but that! It was too horrible— She quivered like a creature
at bay.
As she cowered there, she felt the train moving more
slowly. It was coming then—they were approaching a station!
She saw again the husband and wife standing on the lonely
platform; and with a violent gesture she drew down the shade
to hide her husband’s face.
Feeling dizzy, she sank down on the edge of the berth,
keeping away from his outstretched body, and pulling the cur-
tains close, so that he and she were shut into a kind of sepul-
chral twilight. She tried to think. At all costs she must conceal
the fact that he was dead. But how? Her mind refused to act:
she could not plan, combine. She could think of no way but
to sit there, clutching the curtains, all day long . . .
She heard the porter making up her bed; people were be-
ginning to move about the car; the dressing-room door was
being opened and shut. She tried to rouse herself. At length
with a supreme effort she rose to her feet, stepping into the
aisle of the car and drawing the curtains tight behind her. She
noticed that they still parted slightly with the motion of the
car, and finding a pin in her dress she fastened them together.
Now she was safe. She looked round and saw the porter. She
fancied he was watching her.
“Ain’t he awake yet?” he enquired.
“No,” she faltered.
“I got his milk all ready when he wants it. You know you
told me to have it for him by seven.”
She nodded silently and crept into her seat.
At half-past eight the train reached Buffalo. By this time
the other passengers were dressed and the berths had been
folded back for the day. The porter, moving to and fro under
his burden of sheets and pillows, glanced at her as he passed.
At length he said: “Ain’t he going to get up? You know we’re
ordered to make up the berths as early as we can.”
She turned cold with fear. They were just entering the
station.
“Oh, not yet,” she stammered. “Not till he’s had his milk.
Won’t you get it, please?”
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a journey 71

“All right. Soon as we start again.”

When the train moved on he reappeared with the milk. She
took it from him and sat vaguely looking at it: her brain
moved slowly from one idea to another, as though they were
stepping-stones set far apart across a whirling flood. At length
she became aware that the porter still hovered expectantly.
“Will I give it to him?” he suggested.
“Oh, no,” she cried, rising. “He—he’s asleep yet, I
think—”
She waited till the porter had passed on; then she unpinned
the curtains and slipped behind them. In the semi-obscurity
her husband’s face stared up at her like a marble mask with
agate eyes. The eyes were dreadful. She put out her hand and
drew down the lids. Then she remembered the glass of milk
in her other hand: what was she to do with it? She thought of
raising the window and throwing it out; but to do so she
would have to lean across his body and bring her face close to
his. She decided to drink the milk.
She returned to her seat with the empty glass and after a
while the porter came back to get it.
“When’ll I fold up his bed?” he asked.
“Oh, not now—not yet; he’s ill—he’s very ill. Can’t you let
him stay as he is? The doctor wants him to lie down as much
as possible.”
He scratched his head. “Well, if he’s really sick—”
He took the empty glass and walked away, explaining to the
passengers that the party behind the curtains was too sick to
get up just yet.
She found herself the centre of sympathetic eyes. A moth-
erly woman with an intimate smile sat down beside her.
“I’m real sorry to hear your husband’s sick. I’ve had a re-
markable amount of sickness in my family and maybe I could
assist you. Can I take a look at him?”
“Oh, no—no, please! He mustn’t be disturbed.”
The lady accepted the rebuff indulgently.
“Well, it’s just as you say, of course, but you don’t look to
me as if you’d had much experience in sickness and I’d have
been glad to assist you. What do you generally do when your
husband’s taken this way?”
“I—I let him sleep.”
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72 a journey

“Too much sleep ain’t any too healthful either. Don’t you
give him any medicine?”
“Y—yes.”
“Don’t you wake him to take it?”
“Yes.”
“When does he take the next dose?”
“Not for—two hours—”
The lady looked disappointed. “Well, if I was you I’d try
giving it oftener. That’s what I do with my folks.”
After that many faces seemed to press upon her. The pas-
sengers were on their way to the dining-car, and she was con-
scious that as they passed down the aisle they glanced
curiously at the closed curtains. One lantern-jawed man with
prominent eyes stood still and tried to shoot his projecting
glance through the division between the folds. The freckled
child, returning from breakfast, waylaid the passers with a
buttery clutch, saying in a loud whisper, “He’s sick;” and
once the conductor came by, asking for tickets. She shrank
into her corner and looked out of the window at the flying
trees and houses, meaningless hieroglyphs of an endlessly un-
rolled papyrus.
Now and then the train stopped, and the newcomers on
entering the car stared in turn at the closed curtains. More
and more people seemed to pass—their faces began to blend
fantastically with the images surging in her brain . . .
Later in the day a fat man detached himself from the mist
of faces. He had a creased stomach and soft pale lips. As he
pressed himself into the seat facing her she noticed that he
was dressed in black broadcloth, with a soiled white tie.
“Husband’s pretty bad this morning, is he?”
“Yes.”
“Dear, dear! Now that’s terribly distressing, ain’t it?” An
apostolic smile revealed his gold-filled teeth. “Of course you
know there’s no sech thing as sickness. Ain’t that a lovely
thought? Death itself is but a deloosion of our grosser senses.
On’y lay yourself open to the influx of the sperrit, submit
yourself passively to the action of the divine force, and disease
and dissolution will cease to exist for you. If you could in-
dooce your husband to read this little pamphlet—”
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a journey 73

The faces about her again grew indistinct. She had a vague
recollection of hearing the motherly lady and the parent of
the freckled child ardently disputing the relative advantages of
trying several medicines at once, or of taking each in turn; the
motherly lady maintaining that the competitive system saved
time; the other objecting that you couldn’t tell which remedy
had effected the cure; their voices went on and on, like bell-
buoys droning through a fog . . . The porter came up now
and then with questions that she did not understand, but that
somehow she must have answered since he went away again
without repeating them; every two hours the motherly lady
reminded her that her husband ought to have his drops; peo-
ple left the car and others replaced them . . .
Her head was spinning and she tried to steady herself by
clutching at her thoughts as they swept by, but they slipped
away from her like bushes on the side of a sheer precipice
down which she seemed to be falling. Suddenly her mind
grew clear again and she found herself vividly picturing
what would happen when the train reached New York. She
shuddered as it occurred to her that he would be quite cold
and that some one might perceive he had been dead since
morning.
She thought hurriedly:—“If they see I am not surprised
they will suspect something. They will ask questions, and if I
tell them the truth they won’t believe me—no one would
believe me! It will be terrible”—and she kept repeating to
herself:—“I must pretend I don’t know. I must pretend I
don’t know. When they open the curtains I must go up to
him quite naturally—and then I must scream.” . . . She had
an idea that the scream would be very hard to do.
Gradually new thoughts crowded upon her, vivid and ur-
gent: she tried to separate and restrain them, but they beset
her clamorously, like her school-children at the end of a hot
day, when she was too tired to silence them. Her head grew
confused, and she felt a sick fear of forgetting her part, of be-
traying herself by some unguarded word or look.
“I must pretend I don’t know,” she went on murmuring.
The words had lost their significance, but she repeated them
mechanically, as though they had been a magic formula, until
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74 a journey

suddenly she heard herself saying: “I can’t remember, I can’t

remember!”
Her voice sounded very loud, and she looked about her in
terror; but no one seemed to notice that she had spoken.
As she glanced down the car her eye caught the curtains of
her husband’s berth, and she began to examine the monoto-
nous arabesques woven through their heavy folds. The pattern
was intricate and difficult to trace; she gazed fixedly at the cur-
tains and as she did so the thick stuff grew transparent and
through it she saw her husband’s face—his dead face. She
struggled to avert her look, but her eyes refused to move and
her head seemed to be held in a vice. At last, with an effort that
left her weak and shaking, she turned away; but it was of no
use; close in front of her, small and smooth, was her husband’s
face. It seemed to be suspended in the air between her and the
false braids of the woman who sat in front of her. With an un-
controllable gesture she stretched out her hand to push the
face away, and suddenly she felt the touch of his smooth skin.
She repressed a cry and half started from her seat. The woman
with the false braids looked around, and feeling that she must
justify her movement in some way she rose and lifted her
travelling-bag from the opposite seat. She unlocked the bag
and looked into it; but the first object her hand met was a
small flask of her husband’s, thrust there at the last moment,
in the haste of departure. She locked the bag and closed her
eyes . . . his face was there again, hanging between her eye-
balls and lids like a waxen mask against a red curtain . . .
She roused herself with a shiver. Had she fainted or slept?
Hours seemed to have elapsed; but it was still broad day, and the
people about her were sitting in the same attitudes as before.
A sudden sense of hunger made her aware that she had
eaten nothing since morning. The thought of food filled her
with disgust, but she dreaded a return of faintness, and re-
membering that she had some biscuits in her bag she took
one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she
hastily swallowed a little brandy from her husband’s flask. The
burning sensation in her throat acted as a counter-irritant,
momentarily relieving the dull ache of her nerves. Then she
felt a gently-stealing warmth, as though a soft air fanned her,
and the swarming fears relaxed their clutch, receding through
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a journey 75

the stillness that enclosed her, a stillness soothing as the spa-

cious quietude of a summer day. She slept.
Through her sleep she felt the impetuous rush of the train.
It seemed to be life itself that was sweeping her on with head-
long inexorable force—sweeping her into darkness and terror,
and the awe of unknown days.—Now all at once everything
was still—not a sound, not a pulsation . . . She was dead in
her turn, and lay beside him with smooth upstaring face.
How quiet it was!—and yet she heard feet coming, the feet of
the men who were to carry them away . . . She could feel
too—she felt a sudden prolonged vibration, a series of hard
shocks, and then another plunge into darkness: the darkness
of death this time—a black whirlwind on which they were
both spinning like leaves, in wild uncoiling spirals, with mil-
lions and millions of the dead . . .

She sprang up in terror. Her sleep must have lasted a long

time, for the winter day had paled and the lights had been
lit. The car was in confusion, and as she regained her self-
possession she saw that the passengers were gathering up their
wraps and bags. The woman with the false braids had brought
from the dressing-room a sickly ivy-plant in a bottle, and the
Christian Scientist was reversing his cuffs. The porter passed
down the aisle with his impartial brush. An impersonal figure
with a gold-banded cap asked for her husband’s ticket. A
voice shouted “Baig-gage express!” and she heard the clicking
of metal as the passengers handed over their checks.
Presently her window was blocked by an expanse of sooty
wall, and the train passed into the Harlem tunnel. The jour-
ney was over; in a few minutes she would see her family push-
ing their joyous way through the throng at the station. Her
heart dilated. The worst terror was past . . .
“We’d better get him up now, hadn’t we?” asked the
porter, touching her arm.
He had her husband’s hat in his hand and was meditatively
revolving it under his brush.
She looked at the hat and tried to speak; but suddenly the
car grew dark. She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at
something, and fell face downward, striking her head against
the dead man’s berth.
 THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 2

“You can take the leg off and that might stop it, though I doubt it.
Ernest HEMINGWAY. Or you can shoot me. You’re a good shot now. I taught you to shoot
didn’t I?”
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) “Please don’t talk that way. Couldn’t I read to you?”
“Read what?”
“Anything in the book bag that we haven’t read.”
Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is “I can’t listen to it,” he said. “Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and
said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is that makes the time pass.”
called the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the west- “I don’t quarrel. I never want to quarrel. Let’s not quarrel any
ern summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one
more. No matter how nervous we get. Maybe they will be back with
has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
another truck today. Maybe the plane will come.”
“I don’t want to move,” the man said. “There is no sense in moving
“The marvellous thing is that it’s painless,” he said. “That’s how
now except to make it easier for you.”
you know when it starts.”
“That’s cowardly.”
“Is it really?”
“Can’t you let a man die as comfortably as he can without calling
“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must
him names? What’s the use of slanging me?”
bother you.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Don’t! Please don’t.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m dying now. Ask those bastards.” He looked
“Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings
over to where the huge, filthy birds sat, their naked heads sunk in the
them like that?”
hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to run quick-legged and then
The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and
waddle slowly toward the others.
as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were
“They are around every camp. You never notice them. You can’t
three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen
die if you don’t give up.”
more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.
“Where did you read that? You’re such a bloody fool.”
“They’ve been there since the day the truck broke down,” he said.
“You might think about some one else.”
“Today’s the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way
“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “That’s been my trade.”
they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a
He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat
story. That’s funny now.”
shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There were a few Tom-
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.
mies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far off, he
“I’m only talking,” he said. “It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t
saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a
want to bother you.”
pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close
“You know it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s that I’ve gotten so
by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
very nervous not being able to do anything. I think we might make it
“Wouldn’t you like me to read?” she asked. She was sitting on a
as easy as we can until the plane comes.”
canvas chair beside his cot. “There’s a breeze coming up.”
“Or until the plane doesn’t come.”
“No thanks.”
“Please tell me what I can do. There must be something I can do.”
“Maybe the truck will come.”
“I don’t give a damn about the truck.”
3 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“I do.”
“You give a damn about so many things that I don’t.”
“Not so many, Harry.”
“What about a drink?”
“It’s supposed to be bad for you. It said in Black’s to avoid all alco-
hol. You shouldn’t drink.”
“Molo!” he shouted.
“Yes Bwana.”
“Bring whiskey-soda.”
“Yes Bwana.”
“You shouldn’t,” she said. “That’s what I mean by giving up. It says
it’s bad for you. I know it’s bad for you.”
“No,” he said. “It’s good for me.”
So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a
chance to finish it. So this was the way it ended in a bickering over a
drink. Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and
with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great
tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was
coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but
now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired
enough made it.
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write
until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to
fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them,
and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he
would never know, now.
“I wish we’d never come,” the woman said. She was looking at him
holding the glass and biting her lip. “You never would have gotten
anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could
have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said
I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have
gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable.”
“Your bloody money,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “It was always yours as much as mine. I
left everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I’ve done
what you wanted to do. But I wish we’d never come here.”
“You said you loved it.”
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 4
“I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don’t see why
that had to happen to your leg. What have we done to have that hap-
pen to us?”
“I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first
scratched it. Then I didn’t pay any attention to it because I never in-
fect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was probably using that weak
carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that paralyzed the
minute blood vessels and started the gangrene.” He looked at her.
“What else?”
“I don’t mean that.”
“If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half baked
kikuyu driver, he would have checked the oil and never burned out
that bearing in the truck.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“If you hadn’t left your own people, your goddamned Old West-
bury, Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on–”
“Why, I loved you. That’s not fair. I love you now. I’ll always love
you. Don’t you love me?”
“No,” said the man. “I don’t think so. I never have.”
“Harry, what are you saying? You’re out of your head.”
“No. I haven’t any head to go out of.”
“Don’t drink that,” she said. “Darling, please don’t drink that. We
have to do everything we can.”
“You do it,” he said. “I’m tired.”
Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was
standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient
cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat. That
was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at break-
fast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria
and Nansen’s Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man
looking at it and saying, No, that’s not snow. It’s too early for snow. And the
Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It’s not snow and them all
saying, It’s not snow we were mistaken. But it was the snow all right and he
sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations. And it was
snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.
5 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal,
that year they lived in the woodcutter’s house with the big square porcelain
stove that filled half the room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech
leaves, the time the deserter came with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the
police were right behind him and they gave him woolen socks and held the
gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.
In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes
when you looked out from the weinstube and saw every one coming home from
church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed
road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and
where they ran that great run down the glacier above the Madlener-haus, the
snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remem-
bered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird.
They were snow-bound a week in the Madlener-haus that time in the
blizzard playing cards in the smoke by the lantern light and the stakes were
higher all the time as Herr Lent lost more. Finally he lost it all. Everything,
the skischule money and all the season’s profit and then his capital. He could
see him with his long nose, picking up the cards and then opening, “Sans
Voir.” There was always gambling then. When there was no snow you gam-
bled and when there was too much you gambled. He thought of all the time in
his life he had spent gambling.
But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas
day with the mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown across
the lines to bomb the Austrian officers’ leave train, machine-gunning them as
they scattered and ran. He remembered Barker afterwards coming into the
mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and then somebody
saying, “You bloody murderous bastard.”
Those were the same Austrians they killed then that he skied with later.
No not the same. Hans, that he skied with all that year, had been in the
Kaiser-Jägers and when they went hunting hares together up the little valley
above the saw-mill they had talked of the fighting on Pasubio and of the at-
tack on Perticara and Asalone and he had never written a word of that. Nor
of Monte Corono, nor the Sette Commumi, nor of Arsiero.
How many winters had he lived in the Vorarlberg and the Arlberg? It
was four and then he remembered the man who had the fox to sell when they
had walked into Bludenz, that time to buy presents, and the cherry-pit taste
of good kirsch, the fast-slipping rush of running powder-snow on crust, sing-
ing “Hi! Ho! said Roily!” as you ran down the last stretch to the steep drop,
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 6
taking it straight, then running the orchard in three turns and out across the
ditch and onto the icy road behind the inn. Knocking your bindings loose,
kicking the skis free and leaning them up against the wooden wall of the inn,
the lamplight coming from the window, where inside, in the smoky, new-wine
smelling warmth, they were playing the accordion.
“Where did we stay in Paris?” he asked the woman who was sitting
by him in a canvas chair, now, in Africa.
“At the Crillon. You know that.”
“Why do I know that?”
“That’s where we always stayed.”
“No. Not always.”
“There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said
you loved it there.”
“Love is a dunghill,” said Harry. “And I’m the cock that gets on it
to crow.”
“If you have to go away,” she said, “is it absolutely necessary to kill
off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away
everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn
your saddle and your armour?”
“Yes,” he said. “Your damned money was my armour. My Swift
and my Armour.”
“Don’t.”
“All right. I’ll stop that. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s a little bit late now.”
“All right then. I’ll go on hurting you. It’s more amusing. The only
thing I ever really liked to do with you I can’t do now.”
“No, that’s not true. You liked to do many things and everything
you wanted to do I did.”
“Oh, for Christ sake stop bragging, will you?”
He looked at her and saw her crying.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you think that it is fun to do this? I don’t
know why I’m doing it. It’s trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imag-
ine. I was all right when we started talking. I didn’t mean to start this,
and now I’m crazy as a coot and being as cruel to you as I can be.
Don’t pay any attention, darling, to what I say. I love you, really. You
know I love you. I’ve never loved any one else the way I love you.”
7 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.
“You’re sweet to me.”
“You bitch,” he said. “You rich bitch. That’s poetry. I’m full of po-
etry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.”
“Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?”
“I don’t like to leave anything,” the man said. “I don’t like to leave
things behind.”
It was evening now and he had been asleep. The sun was gone be-
hind the hill and there was a shadow all across the plain and the small
animals were feeding close to camp; quick dropping heads and switch-
ing tails, he watched them keeping well out away from the bush now.
The birds no longer waited on the ground. They were all perched
heavily in a tree. There were many more of them. His personal boy
was sitting by the bed.
“Memsahib’s gone to shoot,” the boy said. “Does Bwana want?”
“Nothing.”
She had gone to kill a piece of meat and, knowing how he liked to
watch the game, she had gone well away so she would not disturb this
little pocket of the plain that he could see. She was always thoughtful,
he thought. On anything she knew about, or had read, or that she had
ever heard.
It was not her fault that when he went to her he was already over.
How could a woman know that you meant nothing that you said; that
you spoke only from habit and to be comfortable? After he no longer
meant what he said, his lies were more successful with women than
when he had told them the truth.
It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell.
He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again
with different people and more money, with the best of the same plac-
es, and some new ones.
You kept from thinking and it was all marvellous. You were
equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way,
the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared
nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do
it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people;
about the very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 8
country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would
be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he
would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of be-
ing that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to
work so that, finally, he did no work at all. The people he knew now
were all much more comfortable when he did not work. Africa was
where he had been happiest in the good time of his life, so he had
come out here to start again. They had made this safari with the min-
imum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and
he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in
some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into
the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body.
She had liked it. She said she loved it. She loved anything that was
exciting, that involved a change of scene, where there were new people
and where things were pleasant. And he had felt the illusion of return-
ing strength of will to work. Now if this was how it ended, and he
knew it was, he must not turn like some snake biting itself because its
back was broken. It wasn’t this woman’s fault. If it had not been she it
would have been another. If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it.
He heard a shot beyond the hill.
She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker
and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent
himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well?
He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and
what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of
his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by
prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old
books? What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead
of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but
always what he could do. And he had chosen to make his living with
something else instead of a pen or a pencil. It was strange, too, wasn’t
it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should
always have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was
in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had the
most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had had a
husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with
them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion
9 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
and as a proud possession; it was strange that when he did not love her
at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her
money than when he had really loved.
We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you
make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one
form or another, all his life and when your affections are not too in-
volved you give much better value for the money. He had found that
out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write
that, although it was well worth writing.
Now she came in sight, walking across the open toward the camp.
She was wearing jodhpurs and carrying her rifle. The two boys had a
Tommie slung and they were coming along behind her. She was still a
good-looking woman, he thought, and she had a pleasant body. She
had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but
he liked her face, she read enormously, liked to ride and shoot and,
certainly, she drank too much. Her husband had died when she was still
a comparatively young woman and for a while she had devoted herself
to her two just-grown children, who did not need her and were embar-
rassed at having her about, to her stable of horses, to books, and to
bottles. She liked to read in the evening before dinner and she drank
Scotch and soda while she read. By dinner she was fairly drunk and
after a bottle of wine at dinner she was usually drunk enough to sleep.
That was before the lovers. After she had the lovers she did not
drink so much because she did not have to be drunk to sleep. But the
lovers bored her. She had been married to a man who had never bored
her and these people bored her very much.
Then one of her two children was killed in a plane crash and after
that was over she did not want the lovers, and drink being no anaes-
thetic she had to make another life. Suddenly, she had been acutely
frightened of being alone. But she wanted some one that she respected
with her.
It had begun very simply. She liked what he wrote and she had al-
ways envied the life he led. She thought he did exactly what he wanted
to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the way in which she
had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular progression
in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what
remained of his old life.
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 10
He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was no deny-
ing that, and for what else? He did not know. She would have bought
him anything he wanted. He knew that. She was a damned nice wom-
an too. He would as soon be in bed with her as any one; rather with
her, because she was richer, because she was very pleasant and appre-
ciative and because she never made scenes. And now this life that she
had built again was coming to a term because he had not used iodine
two weeks ago when a thorn had scratched his knee as they moved
forward trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck standing, their
heads up, peering while their nostrils searched the air, their ears spread
wide to hear the first noise that would send them rushing into the
bush. They had bolted, too, before he got the picture.
Here she came now.
He turned his head on the cot to look toward her. “Hello,” he said.
“I shot a Tommy ram,” she told him. “He’ll make you good broth
and I’ll have them mash some potatoes with the Klim. How do you
feel?”
“Much better.”
“Isn’t that lovely? You know I thought perhaps you would. You
were sleeping when I left.”
“I had a good sleep. Did you walk far?”
“No. Just around behind the hill. I made quite a good shot on the
Tommy.”
“You shoot marvellously, you know.”
“I love it. I’ve loved Africa. Really. If you’re all right it’s the most
fun that I’ve ever had. You don’t know the fun it’s been to shoot with
you. I’ve loved the country.”
“I love it too.”
“Darling, you don’t know how marvellous it is to see you feeling
better. I couldn’t stand it when you felt that way. You won’t talk to me
like that again, will you? Promise me?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t remember what I said.”
“You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a middle-aged
woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been
destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy
me again, would you?”
“I’d like to destroy you a few times in bed,” he said.
11 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“Yes. That’s the good destruction. That’s the way we’re made to be
destroyed. The plane will be here tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m sure. It’s bound to come. The boys have the wood all ready
and the grass to make the smudge. I went down and looked at it again
today. There’s plenty of room to land and we have the smudges ready
at both ends.”
“What makes you think it will come tomorrow?”
“I’m sure it will. It’s overdue now. Then, in town, they will fix up
your leg and then we will have some good destruction. Not that dread-
ful talking kind.”
“Should we have a drink? The sun is down.”
“Do you think you should?”
“I’m having one.”
“We’ll have one together. Molo, letti dui whiskey-soda!” she called.
“You’d better put on your mosquito boots,” he told her.
“I’ll wait till I bathe . . .”
While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there
was no longer enough light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his
way around the hill.
“That bastard crosses there every night,” the man said. “Every
night for two weeks.”
“He’s the one makes the noise at night. I don’t mind it. They’re a
filthy animal though.”
Drinking together, with no pain now except the discomfort of ly-
ing in the one position, the boys lighting a fire, its shadow jumping on
the tents, he could feel the return of acquiescence in this life of pleas-
ant surrender. She was very good to him. He had been cruel and unjust
in the afternoon. She was a fine woman, marvellous really. And just
then it occurred to him that he was going to die.
It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a
sudden evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena
slipped lightly along the edge of it.
“What is it, Harry?” she asked him.
“Nothing,” he said. “You had better move over to the other side.
To windward.”
“Did Molo change the dressing?”
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 12
“Yes. I’m just using the boric now.”
“How do you feel?”
“A little wobbly.”
“I’m going in to bathe,” she said. “I’ll be right out. I’ll eat with you
and then we’ll put the cot in.”
So, he said to himself, we did well to stop the quarrelling. He had
never quarrelled much with this woman, while with the women that he
loved he had quarrelled so much they had finally, always, with the
corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together. He had
loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarrelled in
Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when
that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse,
he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her
how he had never been able to kill it. . . . How when he thought he saw her
outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and
that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the
Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him.
How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How
what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself
of loving her. He wrote this letter at the Club, cold sober, and mailed it to
New York asking her to write him at the office in Paris. That seemed safe.
And that night missing her so much it made him feel hollow sick inside, he
wandered up past Taxim’s, picked a girl up and took her out to supper. He
had gone to a place to dance with her afterward, she danced badly, and left
her for a hot Armenian slut, that swung her belly against him so it almost
scalded. He took her away from a British gunner subaltern after a row. The
gunner asked him outside and they fought in the street on the cobbles in the
dark. He’d hit him twice, hard, on the side of the jaw and when he didn’t go
down he knew he was in for a fight. The gunner hit him in the body, then
beside his eye. He swung with his left again and landed and the gunner fell on
him and grabbed his coat and tore the sleeve off and he clubbed him twice
behind the ear and then smashed him with his right as he pushed him away.
When the gunner went down his head hit first and he ran with the girl be-
cause they heard the M. P.’s coming. They got into a taxi and drove out to
Rimmily Hissa along the Bosphorus, and around, and back in the cool night
13 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
and went to bed and she felt as over-ripe as she looked but smoother, rose-
petal, syrupy, smooth-bellied, big-breasted and needed no pillow under her
buttocks, and he left her before she was awake looking blousy enough in the
first daylight and turned up at the Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying his
coat because one sleeve was missing.
That same night he left for Anatolia and he remembered, later on that
trip, riding all day through fields of the poppies that they raised for opium
and how strange it made you feel, finally, and all the distances seemed wrong,
to where they had made the attack with the newly arrived Constantine offic-
ers, that did not know a goddamned thing, and the artillery had fired into the
troops and the British observer had cried like a child.
That was the day he’d first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and
upturned shoes with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and
lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and the officers shooting
into them and running then themselves and he and the British observer had
run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies
and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as
lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and
later still he had seen much worse. So when he got back to Paris that time he
could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And there in the café as
he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a
stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Rou-
manian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle
and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now he
loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the
office sent his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the one he’d
written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the handwriting
he went cold all over and tried to slip the letter underneath another. But his
wife said, “Who is that letter from, dear?” and that was the end of the begin-
ning of that.
He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They al-
ways picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always
quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had never written any of that be-
cause, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though
there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he
would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world
change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had
watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 14
how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched
it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.
“How do you feel?” she said. She had come out from the tent now
after her bath.
“All right.”
“Could you eat now?” He saw Molo behind her with the folding
table and the other boy with the dishes.
“I want to write,” he said.
“You ought to take some broth to keep your strength up.”
“I’m going to die tonight,” he said. “I don’t need my strength up.”
“Don’t be melodramatic, Harry, please,” she said.
“Why don’t you use your nose? I’m rotted half way up my thigh
now. What the hell should I fool with broth for? Molo bring whiskey-
soda.”
“Please take the broth,” she said gently.
“All right.”
The broth was too hot. He had to hold it in the cup until it cooled
enough to take it and then he just got it down without gagging.
“You’re a fine woman,” he said. “Don’t pay any attention to me.”
She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from Spur
and Town and Country, only a little the worse for drink, only a little the
worse for bed, but Town and Country never showed those good breasts
and those useful thighs and those lightly small-of-back-caressing
hands, and as he looked and saw her well known pleasant smile, he felt
death come again. This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a
wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall.
“They can bring my net out later and hang it from the tree and
build the fire up. I’m not going in the tent tonight. It’s not worth mov-
ing. It’s a clear night. There won’t be any rain.”
So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well,
there would be no more quarrelling. He could promise that. The one
experience that he had never had he was not going to spoil now. He
probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn’t.
“You can’t take dictation, can you?”
“I never learned,” she told him.
“That’s all right.”
15 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
There wasn’t time, of course, although it seemed as though it tele-
scoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get
it right.
There was a log house, chinked white with mortar, on a hill above the
lake. There was a bell on a pole by the door to call the people in to meals.
Behind the house were fields and behind the fields was the timber. A line of
lombardy poplars ran from the house to the dock. Other poplars ran along the
point. A road went up to the hills along the edge of the timber and along that
road he picked blackberries. Then that log house was burned down and all the
guns that had been on deer foot racks above the open fire place were burned
and afterwards their barrels, with the lead melted in the magazines, and the
stocks burned away, lay out on the heap of ashes that were used to make lye
for the big iron soap kettles, and you asked Grandfather if you could have
them to play with, and he said, no. You see they were his guns still and he
never bought any others. Nor did he hunt any more. The house was rebuilt in
the same place out of lumber now and painted white and from its porch you
saw the poplars and the lake beyond; but there were never any more guns.
The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer feet on the wall of the log
house lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever touched them.
In the Black Forest, after the war, we rented a trout stream and there
were two ways to walk to it. One was down the valley from Triberg and
around the valley road in the shade of the trees that bordered the white road,
and then up a side road that went up through the hills past many small
farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road crossed the stream.
That was where our fishing began.
The other way was to climb steeply up to the edge of the woods and then go
across the top of the hills through the pine woods, and then out to the edge of a
meadow and down across this meadow to the bridge. There were birches along
the stream and it was not big, but narrow, clear and fast, with pools where it
had cut under the roots of the birches. At the Hotel in Triberg the proprietor
had a fine season. It was very pleasant and we were all great friends. The
next year came the inflation and the money he had made the year before was
not enough to buy supplies to open the hotel and he hanged himself.
You could dictate that, but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe
where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over
the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always
drunk on wine and bad marc; and the children with their noses running in
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 16
the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Café des
Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above. The Concierge
who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine in her loge, his horse-
hair-plumed helmet on a chair. The locataire across the hall whose husband
was a bicycle racer and her joy that morning at the Cremerie when she had
opened L’Auto and seen where he placed third in Paris-Tours, his first big
race. She had blushed and laughed and then gone upstairs crying with the
yellow sporting paper in her hand. The husband of the woman who ran the
Bal Musette drove a taxi and when he, Harry, had to take an early plane the
husband knocked upon the door to wake him and they each drank a glass of
white wine at the zinc of the bar before they started. He knew his neighbors
in that quarter then because they all were poor.
Around that Place there were two kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs.
The drunkards killed their poverty that way; the sportifs took it out in exer-
cise. They were the descendants of the Communards and it was no struggle for
them to know their politics. They knew who had shot their fathers, their
relatives, their brothers, and their friends when the Versailles troops came in
and took the town after the Commune and executed any one they could catch
with calloused hands, or who wore a cap, or carried any other sign he was a
working man. And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from
a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine co-operative he had written the start of all
he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that,
the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the
long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the
paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the
River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.
The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took
with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under
the tires, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul
Verlaine had died. There were only two rooms in the apartments where they
lived and he had a room on the top floor of that hotel that cost him sixty
francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs
and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris.
From the apartment you could only see the wood and coal man’s place. He
sold wine too, bad wine. The golden horse’s head outside the Boucherie Chev-
aline where the carcasses hung yellow gold and red in the open window, and
the green painted co-operative where they bought their wine; good wine and
17 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
cheap. The rest was plaster walls and the windows of the neighbors. The
neighbors who, at night, when some one lay drunk in the street, moaning and
groaning in that typical French ivresse that you were propaganded to believe
did not exist, would open their windows and then the murmur of talk.
“Where is the policeman? When you don’t want him the bugger is always
there. He’s sleeping with some concierge. Get the Agent.” Till some one
threw a bucket of water from a window and the moaning stopped. “What’s
that? Water. Ah, that’s intelligent.” And the windows shutting. Marie, his
femme de menage, protesting against the eight-hour day saying, “If a hus-
band works until six he gets only a little drunk on the way home and does not
waste too much. If he works only until five he is drunk every night and one
has no money. It is the wife of the working man who suffers from this short-
ening of hours.”
“Wouldn’t you like some more broth?” the woman asked him now.
“No, thank you very much. It is awfully good.”
“Try just a little.”
“I would like a whiskey-soda.”
“It’s not good for you.”
“No. It’s bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music.
This knowledge that you’re going mad for me.”
“You know I like you to drink.”
“Oh yes. Only it’s bad for me.”
When she goes, he thought. I’ll have all I want. Not all I want but
all there is. Ayee he was tired. Too tired. He was going to sleep a little
while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around
another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely
silently on the pavements.
No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about.
But what about the rest that he had never written?
What about the ranch and the silvered gray of the sage brush, the quick,
clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The
trail went up into the hills and the cattle in the summer were shy as deer. The
bawling and the steady noise and slow moving mass raising a dust as you
brought them down in the fall. And behind the mountains, the clear sharpness
of the peak in the evening light and, riding down along the trail in the moon-
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 18
light, bright across the valley. Now he remembered coming down through the
timber in the dark holding the horse’s tail when you could not see and all the
stories that he meant to write.
About the half-wit chore boy who was left at the ranch that time and told
not to let any one get any hay, and that old bastard from the Forks who had
beaten the boy when he had worked for him stopping to get some feed. The boy
refusing and the old man saying he would beat him again. The boy got the
rifle from the kitchen and shot him when he tried to come into the barn and
when they came back to the ranch he’d been dead a week, frozen in the corral,
and the dogs had eaten part of him. But what was left you packed on a sled
wrapped in a blanket and roped on and you got the boy to help you haul it,
and the two of you took it out over the road on skis, and sixty miles down to
town to turn the boy over. He having no idea that he would be arrested.
Thinking he had done his duty and that you were his friend and he would be
rewarded. He’d helped to haul the old man in so everybody could know how
bad the old man had been and how he’d tried to steal some feed that didn’t
belong to him, and when the sheriff put the handcuffs on the boy he couldn’t
believe it. Then he’d started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write.
He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written
one. Why?
“You tell them why,” he said.
“Why what, dear?”
“Why nothing.”
She didn’t drink so much, now, since she had him. But if he lived
he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about any of
them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too
much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He
remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he
had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from
you and me.” And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have
more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they
were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren’t it
wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not
have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he
thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.
19 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had al-
ways dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man,
until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had some-
thing that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking
him, the pain had stopped.
He remembered long ago when Williamson, the bombing officer, had been
hit by a stick bomb some one in a German patrol had thrown as he was com-
ing in through the wire that night and, screaming, had begged every one to
kill him. He was a fat man, very brave, and a good officer, although addicted
to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire, with a flare
lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought
him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake
shoot me. They had had an argument one time about our Lord never sending
you anything you could not bear and some one’s theory had been that meant
that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically. But he had al-
ways remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson
until he gave him all his morphine tablets that he had always saved to use
himself and then they did not work right away.
Still this now, that he had, was very easy; and if it was no worse as
it went on there was nothing to worry about. Except that he would
rather be in better company.
He thought a little about the company that he would like to have.
No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do
too late, you can’t expect to find the people still there. The people all
are gone. The party’s over and you are with your hostess now.
I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he
thought.
“It’s a bore,” he said out loud.
“What is, my dear?”
“Anything you do too bloody long.”
He looked at her face between him and the fire. She was leaning
back in the chair and the firelight shone on her pleasantly lined face
and he could see that she was sleepy. He heard the hyena make a noise
just outside the range of the fire.
“I’ve been writing,” he said. “But I got tired.”
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 20
“Do you think you will be able to sleep?”
“Pretty sure. Why don’t you turn in?”
“I like to sit here with you.”
“Do you feel anything strange?” he asked her.
“No. Just a little sleepy.”
“I do,” he said.
He had just felt death come by again.
“You know the only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity,” he said to
her.
“You’ve never lost anything. You’re the most complete man I’ve
ever known.”
“Christ,” he said. “How little a woman knows. What is that? Your
intuition?”
Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of
the cot and he could smell its breath.
“Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull,” he told her. “It
can be two bicycle policemen as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a
wide snout like a hyena.”
It had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It
simply occupied space.
“Tell it to go away.”
It did not go away but moved a little closer.
“You’ve got a hell of a breath,” he told it. “You stinking bastard.”
It moved up closer to him still and he could not speak to it, and
when it saw he could not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried
to send it away without speaking, but it moved in on him so its weight
was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he could not
move, or speak, he heard the woman say, “Bwana is asleep now. Take
the cot up very gently and carry it into the tent.”
He could not speak to tell her to make it go away and it crouched
now, heavier, so he could not breathe. And then, while they lifted the
cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went from his chest.
It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard
the plane. It showed very tiny and then made a wide circle and the
boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled on grass so
there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the
21 ERNEST HEMINGWAY
morning breeze blew them toward the camp and the plane circled
twice more, low this time, and then glided down and levelled off and
landed smoothly and, coming walking toward him, was old Compton
in slacks, a tweed jacket and a brown felt hat.
“What’s the matter, old cock?” Compton said.
“Bad leg,” he told him. “Will you have some breakfast?”
“Thanks. I’ll just have some tea. It’s the Puss Moth you know. I
won’t be able to take the Memsahib. There’s only room for one. Your
lorry is on the way.”
Helen had taken Compton aside and was speaking to him. Comp-
ton came back more cheery than ever.
“We’ll get you right in,” he said. “I’ll be back for the Mem. Now
I’m afraid I’ll have to stop at Arusha to refuel. We’d better get going.”
“What about the tea?”
“I don’t really care about it you know.”
The boys had picked up the cot and carried it around the green
tents and down along the rock and out onto the plain and along past
the smudges that were burning brightly now, and the grass all con-
sumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult
getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg
was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat.
Compton started the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the
boys and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung
around with Compie watching for wart-hog holes and roared, bump-
ing, along the stretch between the fires and with the last bump rose
and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the
hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the
bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry
waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of.
The zebra, small rounded backs now, and the wildebeeste, big-headed
dots seeming to climb as they moved in long fingers across the plain,
now scattering as the shadow came toward them, they were tiny now,
and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see,
gray-yellow now and ahead old Compie’s tweed back and the brown
felt hat. Then they were over the first hills and the wildebeeste were
trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden
depths of green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO 22
the heavy forest again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they
crossed, and hills sloped down and then another plain, hot now, and
purple brown, bumpy with heat and Compie looking back to see how
he was riding. Then there were other mountains dark ahead.
And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evi-
dently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink
sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first
snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts
were coming up from the South. Then they began to climb and they
were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were
in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall,
and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and
pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world,
great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of
Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.
Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to
make a strange, human, almost crying sound. The woman heard it and
stirred uneasily. She did not wake. In her dream she was at the house
on Long Island and it was the night before her daughter’s debut.
Somehow her father was there and he had been very rude. Then the
noise the hyena made was so loud she woke and for a moment she did
not know where she was and she was very afraid. Then she took the
flashlight and shone it on the other cot that they had carried in after
Harry had gone to sleep. She could see his bulk under the mosquito
bar but somehow he had gotten his leg out and it hung down alongside
the cot. The dressings had all come down and she could not look at it.
“Molo,” she called, “Molo! Molo!”
Then she said, “Harry, Harry!” Then her voice rising, “Harry!
Please, Oh Harry!”
There was no answer and she could not hear him breathing.
Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had
awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart.
THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMAN
By: Louise Erdrich
October 1, 2014

Erdrich exploded onto the literary scene in 1984 with her National Book Critics
Circle Award-winning novel Love Medicine, which follows 60 years in the lives of
a small group of Chippewa Indians—a band of which Erdrich herself is an enrolled
member. In her nearly forty novels, short story collections, poems, and children’s
books since, Erdrich has often brokered the delicate politics of the American
Indian Reservation System and explored the relationships between its residents and
the adjacent communities. Her most recent novel, The Round House, won the
National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. In their citation, PEN/Bellow Award
judges Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, and E.L. Doctorow, who won the award in
2012, said of Erdrich’s career, “Some writers work a small piece of land: Louise
Erdrich is not one of those writers. Her work has an awesome capaciousness—each
person is a world…Erdrich’s eye is always fresh, her sentences never less than
lyrical.”

Louise Erdrich is the winner of the 2014 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement
in American Fiction. The award is presented biannually to a living American
author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or
her in the highest rank of American literature.
THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMAN

(1981)

The morning before Easter Sunday, June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged
main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon
bus arrived that would take her home. She was a long-legged Chippewa woman,
aged hard in every way except how she moved. Probably it was the way she
moved, easy as a young girl on slim hard legs, that caught the eye of the man who
rapped at her from inside the window of the Rigger Bar. He looked familiar, like a
lot of people looked familiar to her. She had seen so many come and go. He
hooked his arm, inviting her to enter, and she did so without hesitation, thinking
only that she might tip down one or two with him and then get her bags to meet the
bus. She wanted, at least, to see if she actually knew him. Even through the watery
glass she could see that he wasn’t all that old and that his chest was thickly padded
in dark red nylon and expensive down.

There were cartons of colored eggs on the bar, each glowing like a jewel in its wad
of cellophane. He was peeling one, sky blue as a robin’s, palming it while he
thumbed the peel aside, when she walked through the door. Although the day was
over- cast, the snow itself reflected such light that she was momentarily blinded. It
was like going underwater. What she walked toward more than anything else was
that blue egg in the white hand, a beacon in the murky air.

He ordered a beer for her, a Blue Ribbon, saying she deserved a prize for being the
best thing he’d seen for days. He peeled an egg for her, a pink one, saying it
matched her turtleneck. She told him it was no turtleneck. You called these things
shells. He said he would peel that for her, too, if she wanted, then he grinned at the
bartender and handed her the naked egg.

June’s hand was colder from the outdoors than the egg, and so she had to let it sit
in her fingers for a minute before it stopped feeling rubbery warm. Eating it, she
found out how hungry she was. The last of the money that the man before this one
had given her was spent for the ticket. She didn’t know exactly when she’d eaten
last. This man seemed impressed, when her egg was finished, and peeled her
another one just like it. She ate the egg. Then another egg. The bartender looked at
her. She shrugged and tapped out a long menthol cigarette from a white plastic case
inscribed with her initials in golden letters. She took a breath of smoke then leaned
toward her companion through the broken shells.

“What’s happening?” she said. “Where’s the party?”

Her hair was rolled carefully, sprayed for the bus trip, and her eyes were deeply
watchful in their sea-blue flumes of shadow. She was deciding.

“I don’t got much time until my bus. . . .” she said.

“Forget the bus!” He stood up and grabbed her arm. “We’re gonna party. Hear?
Who’s stopping us? We’re having a good time!”

She couldn’t help notice, when he paid up, that he had a good-sized wad of money
in a red rubber band like the kind that holds bananas together in the supermarket.
That roll helped. But what was more important, she had a feeling. The eggs were
lucky. And he had a good-natured slowness about him that seemed different. He
could be different, she thought. The bus ticket would stay good, maybe forever.
They weren’t expecting her up home on the reservation. She didn’t even have a
man there, except the one she’d divorced. Gordie. If she got desperate he would
still send her money. So she went on to the next bar with this man in the dark red
vest. They drove down the street in his Silverado pickup. He was a mud engineer.
Andy. She didn’t tell him she’d known any mud engineers before or about that one
she’d heard was killed by a pressurized hose. The hose had shot up into his
stomach from underground.

The thought of that death, although she’d only been half acquainted with the man,
always put a panicky, dry lump in her throat. It was the hose, she thought, snaking
up suddenly from its unseen nest, the idea of that hose striking like a live thing,
that was fearful. With one blast it had taken out his insides. And that too made her
throat ache, although she’d heard of worse things. It was that moment, that one
moment, of realizing you were totally empty. He must have felt that. Sometimes,
alone in her room in the dark, she thought she knew what it might be like.

Later on, the noise falling around them at a crowded bar, she closed her eyes for a
moment against the smoke and saw that hose pop suddenly through black earth
with its killing breath.

“Ahhhhh,” she said, surprised, almost in pain, “you got to be.”

“I got to be what, honeysuckle?” He tightened his arm around her slim shoulders.
They were sitting in a booth with a few others, drinking Angel Wings. Her mouth,
the lipstick darkly blurred now, tipped unevenly toward his.

“You got to be different,” she breathed.

It was later still that she felt so fragile. Walking toward the Ladies’ she was afraid
to bump against anything because her skin felt hard and brittle, and she knew it
was possible, in this condition, to fall apart at the slightest touch. She locked
herself in the bath- room stall and remembered his hand, thumbing back the trans-
parent skin and crackling blue peel. Her clothing itched. The pink shell was sweaty
and hitched up too far under her arms but she couldn’t take off her jacket, the white
vinyl her son King had given her, because the pink top was ripped across the
stomach. But as she sat there, something happened. All of a sudden she seemed to
drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from any- one. Sitting, she leaned
down and rested her forehead on the top of the metal toilet-roll dispenser. She felt
that underneath it all her body was pure and naked—only the skins were stiff and
old. Even if he was no different, she would get through this again.

Her purse dropped out of her hand, spilling. She sat up straight. The doorknob
rolled out of her open purse and beneath the stall. She had to take that doorknob
with her every time she left her room. There was no other way of locking the
battered door. Now she picked up the knob and held it by the metal shank. The
round grip was porcelain, smooth and white. Hard as stone. She put it in the deep
pocket of her jacket and, holding it, walked back to the booth through the gathering
crowd. Her room was locked. And she was ready for him now.
It was a relief when they finally stopped, far out of town on a county road. Even in
the dark, when he turned his headlights off, the snow reflected enough light to see
by. She let him wrestle with her clothing, but he worked so clumsily that she had to
help him along. She rolled her top up carefully, still hiding the rip, and arched her
back to let him undo her slacks. They were made of a stretch fabric that crackled
with electricity and shed blue sparks when he pushed them down around her
ankles. He knocked his hand against the heater’s controls. She felt it open at her
shoulder like a pair of jaws, blasting heat, and had the momentary and voluptuous
sensation that she was lying stretched out before a great wide mouth. The breath
swept across her throat, tightening her nipples. Then his vest plunged down against
her, so slick and plush that it was like being rubbed by an enormous tongue. She
couldn’t get a handhold anywhere. And she felt herself slipping along the smooth
plastic seat, slipping away, until she wedged the crown of her head against the
driver’s door.

“Oh God,” he was moaning. “Oh God, Mary. Oh God, it’s good.”

He wasn’t doing anything, just moving his hips on top of her, and at last his head
fell heavily.

“Say there,” she said, shaking him. “Andy?” She shook him harder. He didn’t
move or miss a beat in his deep breathing. She knew there wasn’t any rousing him
now, so she lay still, under the weight of him. She stayed quiet until she felt herself
getting frail again. Her skin felt smooth and strange. And then she knew that if she
lay there any longer she would crack wide open, not in one place but in many
pieces that he would crush by moving in his sleep. She thought to pull herself back
together. So she hooked an arm over her head and brought her elbow down slowly
on the handle, releasing it. The door suddenly sprang wide.

June had wedged herself so tight against the door that when she sprang the latch
she fell out. Into the cold. It was a shock like being born. But somehow she landed
with her pants halfway up, as though she’d hoisted them in midair, and then she
quickly did her bra, pulled her shell down, and reached back into the truck.
Without groping she found her jacket and purse. By now it was unclear whether
she was more drunk or more sober than she’d ever been in her life. She left the
door open. The heater, set to an automatic temperature, yawned hoarsely behind
her, and she heard it, or thought she did, for about a half mile down the road. Then
she heard nothing but her own boots crunching ice. The snow was bright, giving
back starlight. She concentrated on her feet, on steering them strictly down the
packed wheel ruts.

She had walked far enough to see the dull orange glow, the canopy of low, lit
clouds over Williston, when she decided to walk home instead of going back there.
The wind was mild and wet. A Chinook wind, she told herself. She made a right
turn off the road, walked up a drift frozen over a snow fence, and began to pick her
way through the swirls of dead grass and icy crust of open ranchland. Her boots
were thin. So she stepped on dry ground where she could and avoided the slush and
rotten, gray banks. It was exactly as if she were walking back from a fiddle dance
or a friend’s house to Uncle Eli’s warm, man-smelling kitchen. She crossed the
wide fields swinging her purse, stepping carefully to keep her feet dry.

Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew
numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn’t blow
her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned
crackling cold it didn’t matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.

The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it
like water and came home.